Meme (GW), productivity, drawing, dreams (Saitou, zombs, Russ)

7. How you came across tumblr, and how your life has changed since joining. Aight, I haven’t the faintest idea what “tumblr” is, so instead we’ll make this prompt, “How you came across your current major fandom, and how your life has changed since joining.”

So. Gundam Wing. Of course I’d known of GW as long as I’d known about anime in general, but I didn’t actually watch the series until about (estimating here; could check to be sure, but too lazy) five years ago. Interestingly, I was reading Heero/Duo fanfiction long before I ever watched the show… but, looking back, it was all dreadfully out of character. Oh, weeping uke Duo…

Anyway, this one co-worker of mine at Virgin Mobile was something of an anime fan in general and a good deal more of a Gundam Wing fan specifically. In conversation it came up that I’d never seen the series. He happened to have the Battlefield of Pacifists manga with him at the time, so he let me read it. Of course it confused the hell out of me (I remember wondering rather intensely who Zechs and Treize were, since they were mentioned over and over and over), but there was all this Quatre/Trowa stuff that was so blatant I assumed they must be canon, and that made me happy and got me interested.

So I bought a boxed set of the series off ebay and watched it. And I’ll be perfectly frank: I think the GW canon is rather silly. I mean, I love it; don’t get me wrong — just various aspects of it kinda crack me up, I think the characters are vastly superior to the setting, and the majority of my fic is likely to be AU. MmmmAU.

As for how my life has changed since joining… well, Rurouni Kenshin, and particularly Saitou/Sano (may they rest in peace), has gone so dry and barren in the last few years that I’d kinda forgotten what it’s like to be in a fandom where people are actually doing things. It’s amazing! These GW people post stories and everything!

I can’t claim that Gundam Wing has been solely responsible for my increase in productivity this year, because I think unemployment has had a huge part in that too, but even so… Sun and Shade is, like, my third-longest fic, and Plastic is shaping up to take second or possibly even first. God, that would be something, if it overtook PohP… the end of an era, that would be… In any case, I’ve written a lot of GW fic in (for me) an impressively short time. At last count my number of RK fic pages was something like 1,200, so it’s not likely that GW will top that any time soon, but, still, 300 pages in a year is not something I usually achieve.

OK, enough of that. So it’s Wednesday now, I think. I don’t even feel the tiniest bit guilty about the lack of journal writing lately, because it is Christmas time. I have been hanging out with my brotha and Zombie Girl and working on my stuff. My story’s finished, though I’ma run through it a couple more times; my MV’s going to be finished today, and I am, in fact, working on it right now (writing this post in phases while MV does time-consuming item); and I finished my picture the other night.

That picture >_< I am not very good at drawing. I like to think I’m pretty good at shading, but my linework suuuuucks. This is why a tablet is a lifesaver for me. When I draw on my tablet, I can easily repair faulty linework. I drew Heero with an insanely long torso so he looks like an alien? No problem; I can move and resize the area(s) in question until he looks a little more natural. And if I don’t like the change I’ve made, I can undo it.

But if I’m drawing on paper and I notice that my boys have bizarrely elongated torsos, the options are 1) to erase half of what I’ve already drawn in order to fix it or 2) just to live with it. The first option is problematic because, at my level of fail, I often don’t notice these issues until the lineart is practically done. Which means I’ve already, at great pain, come up with a bunch of stuff that I like and probably won’t be able to duplicate. But the second option is also a problem because of ZOMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM WHY IS HIS CHEST THE SAME LENGTH AS HIS LEGS.

But I like working with Prismas, and I like the way my shading turns out. Not only that, but my carpal tunnel syndrome greatly prefers me to work with actual pencils rather than on a tablet, so the tablet is only an option every so often. So more often than not I get stuck with these scary, disproportionate (but fairly nicely-shaded) pieces that drive me up the wall because I know I could have done them better on tablet. MOU.

I also have a number of dreams I want to mention. In one, I was writing in a notebook (as I often do), and Saitou came up with another of my notebooks to see if it was mine. He was laughing at my handwriting and the little pictures of faces I’d drawn within. In my dreams I often have this interestingly hopeless relationship with Saitou: he and I both know that I want him and that he doesn’t want me; I flirt with him anyway, and he responds with relatively good-natured mockery. That’s what this dream was like.

In another, very sad dream, there were zombies. AAUGH zombie dreams; how I wish I didn’t have them. Anyway, I and two other people that were kindof almost my siblings were trying to sleep, and the process of sleeping teleported us to different parts of the building or something..? And my parents were selflessly guarding us and helping with this process (it was a very complicated process, for sleeping), keeping zombies off us while we got our very important rest… or something. All I really know about it is that it was noble and sad.

At one point, there was a fairly strong zombie attack, and Lester and my mom got injured. After the zombies were all cleared up, my mom realized that she’d been bitten and was going to die and turn into a zombie. This is so sad I can’t even document it here without crying. Because she put her gun to her head very coolly and calmly, unhesitatingly ready to kill herself and negate the possibility of becoming a zomb before we had to do it for her. Lester was in much the same situation, and I suggested that we all kill ourselves — because it was obvious we weren’t going to escape, and if two of us were going to die anyway we might as well all go. That was when I woke up, thank Poe.

In another dream, I was Mary Russell and married to Sherlock Holmes. I was trying to solve some mystery, which was, for some reason, set up like a treasure hunt — I had, like, a list of clues. One of them indicated that I needed to get the bait off of some guy’s fishing hook. It was random. Later, Lester was following this same list, and I was able to help him because I’d already done half of it. The whole dream didn’t make much sense.

What was really amusing about it, though, was that I-dreamer was aware that I had taken over the role of Russ and was contemplating things from the outside like, “Wait, is this before or after she married him…” and “How often did they have sex? Am I going to have to have sex with Holmes?” Also, in this dream apparently Russell was an anime character rather than a book character, and I kept pronouncing her name “Rasseru” XD XD

There were other dreams, but thinking about these ones has made me forget them. I had one of those bad sleeps last night — the kind where I wake up every half hour or so, and therefore remember a lot more dreams than usual (though they simultaneously make less sense).

Also I think I had more to say, but now I will go out to lunch wis family types. Therefore I will write other stuff tomorrow or whatevs.

In a way, you’re lucky to be involved with GW fandom now. It’s much less active, but some of the better writers are people who have been producing stories in the last few years. The stories seem a lot better written and in character, at least to me. I include you in the list of better writers currently in the fandom, too. :-)

Good luck with your drawing. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the picture, but I hope you’ll be happy with it, too.